Rob Bell, Fundamentalist: 5 Ironies from the New Bell Film

Owen Strachan / Mar 15

It’s the strangest thing: the heretic is actually the fundamentalist.

I just watched the new Rob Bell documentary. It’s entitled The Heretic. Here’s a better title for it: The Fundamentalist: Rob Bell Walks Through Airports. I’ll explain what I mean below, and encourage you to look for the early April podcast I just recorded with Isaac Dagneau of indoubt ministries.

After viewing The Heretic, I was struck by five ironies that relate not merely to Bell, but “progressive” post-evangelical gurus more broadly. Here they are.

First, the so-called “heretics” are the new fundamentalists. The worst people for a post-evangelical are the so-called “fundamentalists.” According to Bell and others in the film, fundamentalists believe in a woodenly literal Bible, emphasize the bloody death of Jesus, and get really excited about preaching on the damnation of sinners. Fundamentalists do not exhibit an open mind; they guard their fences with extreme watchfulness; they do not show generosity of spirit to others; they draw the lines of doctrine sharply, and are eager to keep the bad guys out.

Bell’s doctrine is heretical, as is well-known. In the documentary, he continues to espouse his soft universalism, he argues that the Bible has damaging teaching in it, and he downplays biblical morality. But here’s the curious thing: Bell actually operates and speaks as a “fundamentalist.” He does not exhibit an open mind toward conservative religious types; he censures them. He does not truly believe that everyone has an equal place in the Christian tradition; he believes that serious evangelicals are bad people. He does not show generosity in the film toward his disputants; over and over again, he drags them through the mud. He does not truly hold an open, flexible, free-thinking faith; he draws his own doctrinal lines precisely, and makes no bones about excluding conservatives. He talks openly—to my honest surprise—about helping “people read the Bible in a much better way.” That’s how a conservative talks!

It’s the strangest thing: the heretic is actually the fundamentalist.

Second, doubt is the inerrant principle of the post-evangelicals. Doubt is the new “truth.” We hear emergent leader Peter Rollins say of Bell, for example, “he put his finger on a doubt and a questioning that was in that [evangelical] community, but wasn’t able to be expressed.” The sum and substance of The Heretic is that doubt is good, doubt is what makes faith comes alive, doubt frees you from the trap of red-faced literalistic evangelicalism. But doubt receives so much praise in the film, its little wings cannot bear it aloft any longer. Doubt is not truth; that makes no sense.

The film urges us, as Bell does, to doubt the fundamentalists, but unswervingly trust the heretic. It features no conversation, no debate, no open inquiry. When we see Bell on stage, he offers up straw men. He says of his past, mimicking an announcer: “‘In a previous life, he was a megachurch pastor in the Midwest.’ And now you’re like, I do believe in hell.” The crowd laughs. They know their cultural cues; they know the creeds and confessions of secular orthodoxy. They have been dogmatically trained to despise A) megachurches, B) pastors, and C) the Midwest. So much for the “inclusion” and unity Bell celebrates. He’s a doubter who urges us not only to doubt others, but to dislike them. This we receive as an article of faith; we must not doubt it.

Third, everything can be re-thought—and should be re-thought—except post-evangelical thought. This idea surfaces repeatedly in The Heretic. Commenting on Bell’s background, Elizabeth Gilbert strains to say nice things about the evangelicals. She does verbal backflips, speaking in fluent postmodernese of how Bell’s former communities tried to live out their ideals and “found sustenance” in them. But in describing Bell’s sojourn, she lets slip that Bell “matured beyond” his old haunts. The takeaway is plain: in post-evangelicalism, you are freed to re-think your old “community.” Re-think it until in your re-thinking it is so re-thought that it cannot be thought. Everything should be re-thought, in fact, with one tiny exception: that which the re-thinkers think. We should question everything except those who question everything.

Irony this thick should come with duck-fat fries and a charred jalapeno aioli.

The preceding applies to Bell’s doctrine of revelation. Bell attacks conservative evangelicals, saying of their biblical approach that “Most of them are reading it as fundamentalists.” But while Bell critiques a literal, trusting hermeneutic—one in which we take the words of Scripture, genre-driven, as the actual truth of God—he expects us to use precisely such a hermeneutic for his words. We should not read his book Love Wins, for example, as if it is actually about a Swedish cat who becomes a unicorn in the zombie apocalypse. No, we should take Bell at his word; we should read his book, and listen to his talks, like the dreaded “fundamentalists” do. Post-evangelicalism torches literalism, what we could call trusting receptivity, while depending on it.

Fourth, the post-evangelicals critique capitalism while making bushels of money off of it. Early in The Heretic, Bell speaks of how the corrupted evangelical establishment became “deeply entrenched” with capitalism. Sure, conservative evangelicals can fall into the money-trap; I can acknowledge that, sadly. Bell’s critique of evangelicalism lands in a few places, it’s true. But here’s the thing: I bought the film for $9. The list price of Bell’s new book is nearly university-press level: $27.99. Ticket prices for one stop on Bell’s upcoming tour: $50 if you want the “PRE-SHOW Q&A + FEES.”

Last I checked, most of the current-evangelicals—a distinct species from the post-evangelicals—cannot get near this for the pre-show. We don’t get this for the pre-show, the show, or the after-show. There is no show for most of us. There is for Rob Bell, though, who is if anything an extremely shrewd capitalist, with a management team that deserves international awards for its “deep entrenchment” with the free market.

Fifth, the post-evangelicals evacuate their worldview of moral clarity. I confess that, as a theologian, I often struggle to figure out the ethics of the post-evangelicals. It’s not that Bell is unaware of moral matters; for example, critiquing the biblical God in his slippery way, he queries, “Where was the traditional God in the Holocaust, though?” At another point, Bell says that atheism and belief are “different dimensions” of what it means to be alive; he also notes repeatedly that the Bible is about “inclusion,” as previously noted.

But what has Bell done to actual ethics? This is not a trick question: if you remove the need for repentance from Christian faith, what does this communicate to on-the-ground sinners? If you tell them that the yellow-teeth literalists of the vengeful Midwest have hijacked Christianity by preaching the need to turn away from sin and from hell, what power for moral transformation remains in your theism? I would guess that your average sinner who hears Bell likely enjoys what they hear, for they are not challenged to renounce their ungodliness. They are, according to axiomatic post-evangelicalism, broken, messy, and messed up, but God loves them anyway. This line of argument works fine for your average middle-class bookstore-browser, most of whom reach Peak Personal Rebellion by dying a turquoise streak in their hair, but what about non-respectable lawbreakers—the Nazi? The child molester? Are they “included,” and is their wickedness merely a “different dimension” of humanity?

The Heretic makes no effort to handle these real questions. All belief systems have pressure points, but Bell’s post-evangelicalism seems unaware of possible weaknesses. Various figures tell us how much they like Bell’s morally-relaxed brand of theism, but they give us no sense of how we handle people who for no good reason want to slash and maim and kill, who want to blow others up and destroy innocence and beat their spouse. There are not a few of these types; in fact, the actual Christian worldview (not the post-evangelical kind) teaches us with clear-eyed firmness that we all carry the seeds of unrestrainable evil in our hearts, and therefore, we must all repent and trust Christ (Matt. 5:21-30). The post-evangelicals, however, have let their grip on such anthropological realism relax.

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The Heretic, directed by Andrew Morgan, is a film making a clear argument. It seeks to convince us that Bell is the heretic we need, and that Christianity should make more space for Bell’s brand of thought. But The Heretic actually ends up making, quite accidentally, the opposite point. It shows us a tragedy in the making, a man once known for his preaching gift who has now turned his back on the truth, and has become the very thing he denounces.

All logical failings aside, how awful. Here’s hoping that, amidst all the undiscovered irony, God shows him the grace of ruin, and the grace of repentance.

(All quotes are delivered according to the best of my note-taking ability. On post-evangelicalism, see also this insightful piece by Mike Kruger.)